


It's Better To Swim

by RunawayMarbles



Series: Not Cover Art [6]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Offscreen character death, Post-Canon, Storytelling, what if Treaure Island was the real fanfic all along
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 11:19:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15290412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunawayMarbles/pseuds/RunawayMarbles
Summary: These are the stories they tell, after.





	It's Better To Swim

.  
Mrs. Hudson hadn’t forgotten what London feels like, but it’s odd to be back.

She won’t miss the constant sun, or the heat, or the bugs. She certainly won’t miss the war.

And yet there’s something wrong about the drizzle falling on her, something off about the once-familiar smell of the streets.

But maybe it's her.

She’d come from a battlefield. She’d come from a world where her lie could get good men killed and a bad man hanged. She’d come from a place that balanced so long on the edge of collapse that the fall itself felt like an afterthought.

But London continues as it always has, the same as it always was.

Unlike her children.

She half expects them to be adults when she returns, but in truth it’s only been months. Still, they’ve grown. Isabella’s hair is long, and Mrs. Hudson thinks little David’s face is sharper. Or perhaps she forgot just how much baby fat he had when she left.

The first thing they do is hug her. The second thing they do is ask about the pirates.

“Did you meet any?” Isabella asks, bouncing on her toes. Mrs. Hudson hasn’t even begun to unpack.

Their one-room flat feels so small after the governor’s mansion.

“Tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us—” David chants, voice growing louder with each repetition.

The only pirate Mrs. Hudson had known isn’t the story they want. Someday, when Isabella is older, she will tell her— tell her about the woman who tried to guide a riptide of an island, and what men did to her for it. Maybe someday she will tell them both about Spanish guns brought from their own side, and the screams that will always keep her awake, no matter how many miles and months and years removed.

But now, she says this instead:

“We were at war with Captain Flint, the most terrible of all the pirates.”

She tells them of the ships he took and people he killed.

She tells them about Long John Silver, and crossed swords on the deck of a ship.

(She tells them very little that’s true.)

 

.

“There was a man,” Woodes Rogers says. Isn’t that the way every story begins? _There was a man. There was a man who tried to save Madagascar. There was a man who tried to save the Bahamas._

“There’s always a man,” says Barnaby. “If there’s not a man, there’s a woman.”

Barnaby doesn’t know it, but there’s a woman here, too. She’s sitting just at the corner of Rogers’s eye, glaring at him. Her green dress is untouched by the grime of the cell.

“There was a man,” he repeats. Once he’d had an audience for these stories. Now he has Barnaby. “His name was Alexander Selkirk. Sailed under William Dampier during the war of Spanish Succession. You heard of him?”

“No.”

“William Dampier? The naturalist? The explorer?”  _The buccaneer?_

Barnaby shakes his head, and Rogers sighs.

 _Anyone who’s anyone knows who Dampier is,_ Eleanor says. _Seems they’ve got you here with no one._

“Well this man, Selkirk, he had a fight with Dampier. Stomped off and decided to stay on an island they’d stopped at. It was a good place to take on water— he assumed another ship would be by soon enough, and he’d join them. So Dampier sailed away, and Selkirk stayed. And waited. But no ships came. He had to learn to survive on the island: to build shelters, to hunt goats with his bare hands and wear their skins. But when he finally saw sails on the horizon, it was the Spanish. They’d heard about him, and they were there to hunt him down.”

Spanish ships. Powerful, awe inspiring Spanish ships. Rogers had stood on one and felt the world at his fingertips, and then he’d stepped off it and everything had collapsed with barely a touch.

“So he hid. They destroyed his shelter, his supplies, months of work— he had to start over. This happened a few times, so he lived in constant terror. No English voices for years, and naught but the goats for company.”

“Huh,” Barnaby says. “I wouldn’t mind some goat right now.”

That’s not the point. Barnaby can’t possibly understand the point. “He lived like this for four years, and four months. But then one day, I came by. A fellow Englishman, there to take him home. It was everything he’d been wanting. I wasn’t even going to charge him passage. How often do you get that? A free answer to all your prayers?” A pretty girl who can solve all your problems? “But then he saw Dampier, who was sailing with my company. And he said, no, maybe he’ll stay on the island after all. We had to beg and cajole him to get him on board. Everything he ever wanted, and he made us plead to give it to him. Everything he ever wanted, and he just about threw it away out of spite. Because one part wasn’t just right.”

“Hmm.”

Barnaby isn’t even listening anymore. He’s picking at one of the stones.

“I suppose I should have realized then, what savage men would be like. I should have known you can’t reason with them. Everything on their own terms, everything just perfect or not at all. Can’t take my generous mercy because they don’t like Hornigold, or because a governor somewhere said something rude to them once so they can’t abide the office, or because it would involve some fucking compromise and their pride would never allow it.”

Their pride, their fucking pride. Eleanor shooting at his ship. There was a man, and there was a woman, and who had that man been after that?

“I’ll go back someday,” he continues. “And I’ll know what to do. The time for mercy is over. The time for negotiation is over. It was over when I brought the Spanish, but my attempts had already weakened the foundation.”

They won’t remember him as Woodes Rogers, the failure in debtors prison. They won’t remember him as Woodes Rogers, the disgrace. Those letters Rackham wrote won’t be the end of his story.

 _They’ll remember Selkirk long after they’ll remember you,_ Eleanor says.

Rogers snorts. “Nobody will know his name.”

 

 

.

  
She’s been queen for so long that it’s sometimes hard to remember a time before. Before every decision was balanced against hundreds of lives. Once, she’d been a child on another continent— then she’d been nothing. Now she’s so much to so many people, and sometimes she forgets who _she_ is in the middle of that.

But it’s easy to remember, looking at the boy.

He’s making a picture out of stones on the floor of her hut, eyebrows furrowed in concentration. He looks so much like Madi in that moment, and she cherishes it.

“Papa was sad again this morning,” Jimmy says. He’s been working up to it for a few minutes now. There’s a question in his words, but he hasn’t found it yet.

“I know.” Many people on her island have memories that freeze them or cause them to lash out in turn, and she can’t be anything but glad that Silver handles it by leaving the camp. He’s made friends, here. He’s become part of her family. But his anger will never be welcome. “Your mama went to the cliffs with him.”

“That’s what you do when you’re married.” The words clearly aren’t Jimmy’s, and it makes her smile.

“Yes.”

“Are you married?”

The question pulls her up short, and she shifts in her chair. “Yes,” she says, after a moment. “I was married to Madi’s father. Your grandfather. But he died a couple years before you were born.”

“Oh.” He continues with his stones for a moment. “Why?”

Why?

She asks herself that, sometimes. He never told her exactly what happened, but there was something in the eyes of the men who brought him back— guilt, like it could have been prevented. But perhaps not. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to talk his way out of it, and the alternative was being hanged in Nassau, far from her.

If she thinks like that, she’ll never find peace again.

“There was a fight to defend this island,” she says carefully, trying to think of how to explain any of this to a child of five years. A child who, by their own design, doesn’t know what’s coming for him in this world. _There was a fight, and the scars of that fight are on the men and women who live here. There was a fight, but my husband had been shot before it was even an idea._ “He went in disguise to the people who didn’t like us, pretending to serve them while secretly helping us. He’d find our lost people and help them get here. He’d send us supplies as well, and information.”

Jimmy looks at her, rubbing a stone between his palms. “Like a spy?”

 _Like a pirate._ “A little like that, yes,” she says. “He did that for years. He was very brave.”

“If he was there, how did he see you and Mama?”

“He didn’t. But he missed us very much.”

“Oh.” The boy considers. “I could be a spy.”

It’s the thoughtless comment of a child, and it terrifies her— because with the right upbringing, he could be. She tries not to think about it. “Oh?”

“I stole all of these stones from Koji and he hasn’t even found out yet.”

She rubs a hand across her eyes.

_Like a pirate._

 

 

.

The tavern isn’t like any in Nassau, although it’s not much more respectable. There’s a fight about to break out at the card table: Anne can see the future in one man’s clenched jaw, in the tensing of another’s arm.

She waits in her corner, both hands around a tin mug.

Whatever’s inside it is disgusting, but she drinks it anyway. Drink it, don’t drink it— neither choice will be able to change the last few weeks, or wash it away. She might as well embrace that.

It’s why, when the man who now sits across from her had started asking questions, she hadn’t thrown him out the nearest window. Nobody would have minded if she had, but it would have gotten attention, and she doesn’t know who she’s supposed to be anymore. Best to keep her head down until she figures that out.

Jack would have been awful at that. He’d have hated it. But Jack—

Isn’t here.

The man she’s looking at instead says his name is Johnson, which sounds like a lie, and that he’s writing a book, which doesn’t.

“What do you want to know?” she asks, after a few minutes of glowering doesn’t scare him off.

“Whatever you want to tell me.” Probably-not-Johnson hasn’t touched his own drink. He doesn’t fit in here, but she can’t get a read on him. He could be a rich man looking for excitement, or a poor man looking for money. “I’d just like to hear your story, and share it with others.”

Jack is the one who loved the stories. Most of Anne wants to tell this man to fuck off on principle because her story is hers and it ain’t worth much. But Jack—

_Jack—_

This is what Jack wanted. This is all Jack wanted. More than gold, more than his life. He can’t have either of those, now, but if this man does what he says he can do he’ll at least have his story.

So she tells a story.

She tells him about an affair and stolen silver and a daughter sent off to the colonies. It’s what he expects. She tells him of boredom in a boring marriage and being swept off her feet by a dashing pirate, and he expects that, too.

He wouldn’t have believed her if he saw Jack’s sideburns. The way he tilted his head when he spoke, and his aversion to coming to blows.

But she knows how Jack wanted to be remembered, and it’s not how he lived. So she speaks of a man who isn’t quite him— slightly more ruthless, slightly less cunning. The kind of man who would be worth adding into books and plays. The kind of man who will live forever.

“Did you see him?” Johnson asks. “Before he died?”

She had.

The truth is that she and Jack had clung to each other. That the man who had appeared unflappable in the face of hanging by Woodes Rogers had broken down, and he’d hidden his face in her shoulder.

 _Promise me,_ he’d said, when every attempt at escape had left them where they started. _That you’ll do whatever you can to survive._

The truth is that they’d cried like children.

She tells Johnson that they fought.

“And the baby?” he asks, eyes flicking to her stomach and back up again, as though he’d caught himself part way through.

She shrugs. “Guess we’ll see. After prison an’ all.”

There isn’t a baby. Just a doctor willing to keep his mouth shut. Anne had never thought about children, but she mourns it now as a chance she’ll never have again. She isn’t fit to be a parent, and her world isn’t fit to raise a child in, but—

But it would have been nice, maybe. To have something that’s part of Jack.

“This story you’re writing,” she says instead. “How’s it gonna end?”

He smiles. “However you want it to. We could give you a heroic death, keep people from looking for you. Or we could say you’re still out there, and keep that fear alive. It’s your choice.”

She’s thirty-three years old. Her death could make her story, however she wants to tell it. Her life could create a legend.

She’s thirty-three years old, and it feels ancient.

“No,” she says. “Just tell them I disappeared.”

 

 

.

Jim is thirteen years old when Silver catches him with his pants down.

Silver looks at the sky while both boys stammer, and one of them flees while the other starts to cry. He wants to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

“A dozen boys your age on this island,” he says, “and you pick Julius’s son?”

This isn’t the reaction Jim had expected. He rubs his hand across his eyes, clearly angry at being caught, angry at himself, angry that he’s crying and angry that he’s scared. Silver tries not to let that expression break his heart.

“Julius has said horrible things about your mother,” he continues.

Jim gapes at him. “Is that what you’re… are… aren’t you angry?”

Jesus.

The boys had been behind a shack— barely even hiding. There are so many things Jim is going to have to learn, but part of Silver is glad he hasn’t had to learn them yet.

“Walk with me,” he says. “Wait— fix your pants first.”

He’s faster on his crutch than he used to be, but he’s still slower than Jim. Which means he knows his son is lagging behind on purpose.

“I didn’t even know you and Koji were friends.” He’s never been one of the boys that Jim ran around with— as far as Silver had known, they had been in a childish extension of their parents’ old rivalry, which mostly involved pranks and trying to be the best at throwing things.

“We’re not really friends,” Jim mumbles. “We’ve just—” he doesn’t stop in time.

God, Silver is going to have to talk to his son about sex. Maybe Madi can do it, although if Silver suggests that, she’ll probably give him a look and say that he’s more qualified in this particular area.

Does she know about this?

Jesus _Christ,_ why can’t Jimmy be a child for a few more years?

He’s on the path to the cliffs before he fully thinks about it. The camp’s edges have shifted a little closer to it in the last ten years or so, but it’s still remote. Still where Silver goes when he can’t breathe. When he needs to remember.

“Are you going to yell?” Jim asks, “because, if you are, you could just do it here—”

“I’m not going to yell. If you thought I was going to be angry—” _then I failed you._ He shakes his head. He used to be so good at knowing exactly what to say, but he’s always lost that skill when faced with his son. So he’s silent as they round the top of the hill, where the whole ocean spreads out to meet them.

“If I thought you were going to be angry what?”

“Captain Flint taught me how to sword fight here,” Silver says, instead of answering. “Probably saved my life a dozen times over.”

“I know.”

Jim knows. Jim knows of a black flag with an anatomy and an hourglass. He knows of a war ended before it began. But the rest—

“Did I ever tell you about how he became a pirate?”

Jim’s forehead wrinkles as he thinks, and then he shakes his head.

Silver knows he hasn’t told him. There’s still too much of a liar in him to not remember what he's told who. He doesn’t know why he asked. “He was in the Navy. A liaison to the son of the Lord Proprietor to the Bahamas and Carolina colony. They were supposed to— well, it doesn’t matter what they were doing. What mattered was that they fell in love.”

“Captain Flint—”

“He loves men.” The present tense doesn’t quite fit in Silver’s mouth. Captain Flint is buried in a box of treasure Silver will never go back for, but the man whose face he wore is still out there. Silver had only gotten to know that man in bits and pieces. By a lantern at night. On a ship to Savannah.

He’ll have to tell the full story to his son, one day. Perhaps on the day that he also teaches him what it will take to survive in the world off this island, a word that threatens them more with every passing year. But he’ll put it off just a little bit longer.

He understands the Maroon Queen’s old hesitance more than ever.

Jim’s eyes are wide. “What happened?”

“The Lord Proprietor found out. His son was sent away, and Flint was exiled. Believing his lover was dead, he spent years looking for revenge. That led him to piracy— led him to hunt a ship carrying enough gold to create a society apart from England and her crimes. That hunt led him to me, when he captured the ship I was sailing on. And when we found the gold, he was able to leverage it to start his war.”

Captain Flint is buried on Skeleton Island, but if Silver looks at the sea for long enough, he can sometimes hear his voice on the wind. See his face in the waves. In the storms and calms. He’s loudest in the creaking of ships, but Silver hasn’t set foot on a ship in nearly fourteen years.

“But at the end of that war, Flint learned that his lover was not dead as he had been told. They’re out there somewhere now, together.”

“Are they happy?” Jim asks.

It’s an innocent question. It’s a dangerous question. There are a hundred ways they could have suffered in the last seventeen years, but Silver won’t accept an ending that leaves them anything but alive. At peace.

“I hope so,” he says, after a little too long.

He doesn’t say: _I loved Flint, too._

 

 

.

Mrs. Augustus Featherstone smiles.

The guests— merchants, lawful and orderly— smile back, then look elsewhere.

It rankles, a little bit. If she hadn’t given up her old low-cut corsets for something more respectable, they wouldn’t have been able to look away. Though she doesn't she miss the leering, or the comments, or the unwanted hands. She does miss the constant presence of other women, sometimes, but it’s not like she can’t visit Alice and the others, as long as she does it quiet-like. It’s not seemly for the governor’s wife to be seen at the brothel.

And she’s got Max.

It’s a good life.

It’s a far better life than she ever could have dreamed up.

But sometimes she looks at the newcomers, and wonders what faces they’d make if they learned the honorable governor’s wife had fucked Charles Vane. Had licked rum off of Long John Silver’s chest. Had stolen from Jack Rackham and then saved his life. Had helped start a war with a whisper in Augustus’s ear. Had given Vane the information that led him to hang.

None of those things had felt like stories when she’d done them. Time was, there wasn’t a single girl in the inn who hadn’t had some famous pirate or another in her bed. Who hadn’t traded in secrets.

This island had been a world of its own.

But no longer.

So she smiles and she nods and she offers wealthy men tea, and she keeps her past to herself.

When Augustus dies, fifteen years after their marriage, the people mourn. Properly. Politely. They raise glasses of wine in his name, and tell tales of his neat, lawful deeds.

Idelle dons a black veil and tells no stories at all.

 

 

.

There’s someone at the door.

It’s a young mulatto man, sixteen if he’s a day, with curly hair and sharp cheekbones. James would have thought him older had it not been for the nervous way he’s bouncing on his toes.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

The young man looks at him for a long moment, and James is about to ask if he’s lost, or confused — but then the man smiles.

The smile is broad and unassuming and last seen before Charles Town burned.

“Fuck no,” James says, and makes to slam the door, but the young man throws out a hand to stop him.

Behind him, Thomas stands at the commotion. “What’s going on?”

“My name is Jim Silver,” the young man says. “And I’ve come a long way to find you.”

There’s a moment of silence.

And then Thomas elbows James out of the way to greet the visitor and offer him tea, leaving James to stumble back into his seat.

Silver has a son.

 _Madi_ has a son.

That son is sitting in one of James’s chairs, holding one of Thomas’s teacups, looking at him with wide eyes.

Silver and Madi have a son, and his name is Jim. _James._

It might not even be his real name. Could be one he’d taken along the way in order to convince James to— to do whatever he’s here for, because it’s unlikely he’s traveled this way for a chat. He’s going to be here to appeal to James’s sentimentality, his care for Silver and Madi, and what better way to do so than to make him think they care for him back—

But it might be true.

“How the fuck did you find us?” James asks. “I don’t recall leaving a forwarding address.”

Jim— and James must think of him as Jim, because he certainly can’t think of him as _Silver_ — looks pleased with himself. “You did, though,” he says. “My mother has known where you were for years. She said that when she heard about a revolt at a plantation just three weeks after you left—”

Thomas’s cough sounds a lot like _'two weeks.'_

“She met with a contact in Jamaica, who had a contact in the Great Dismal Swamp, who had a contact in Savannah who had first hand knowledge of the event. Her name was Nellie.”

“Nellie?” Thomas splutters. Nellie was a young woman owned by Mr. Oglethorpe— and half the reason their escape was successful at all. She’d been going north, last they’d seen her.

Had Flint’s face looked like Thomas’s now? When he’d learned about Mr. Scott?

“If Madi knew where we were,” James says, “why didn’t she…” he doesn’t know how to finish that. He can’t expect her to visit. She’s got responsibilities. They can't even write— in the wrong hands, that might be considered a violation of the treaty. “What brings you now?”

Jim clears his throat. It’s probably an attempt to sound imposing. “Governor Featherstone is dead. Woodes Rogers is returning to Nassau.”

Thomas’s hands tense around his own cup. “I thought that the deal was for him to rot in debtors prison.” He’d taken the news of Rogers’s misappropriation of his plans about as well as James had— he just hadn’t had a fully armed ship with which to express his feelings. James wants to reach out and— pat his arm, or something— but he’s all too aware of Jim’s eyes.

“He got out,” Jim says. “A man wrote a book, people started to care, he got the governorship back.”

That book— James has seen that book. _A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates._ He hasn’t read it.

“What do you want us to do about it?” he says instead. If they were still on the plantation, with a bunch of angry men and a stockpile of machetes, perhaps he could have done something. But he’d led them in revolt more than fifteen years ago. Now he has Thomas, an ailing donkey, and a small one-room house with a stove and a bookshelf.

It’s more than he’d ever hoped for, but there’s not much he can do from here.

Until Jim slides a piece of paper across the table. There’s an outline carefully drawn on it. It’s not labeled, but James would know it anywhere.

“You want the money.”

“Rogers knows where we are. He has a vendetta. If We're to keep our people safe, we’re going to need more resources. My parents think you know where to get some.”

His parents? Or his mother?

James traces the edge of the map. “What has your father told you?”

“Lots,” Jim says, chin out in a way that reminds James of Madi.

“And how much of that is the truth?”

“Are you calling my father a liar?”

Thomas snorts into his teacup.

James shrugs. “Yes.”

Jim doesn’t seem to have a very good response to that, and he looks between James and Thomas for a moment like he’s waiting for one of them to speak, before saying— “he told me about _you._ Was that a lie?”

It could have been. There are lots of lies Silver could tell— has told— about Flint. It depends on the story he was writing. But Jim is looking at Thomas now, and James wonders if this child knows all his secrets.

If Silver wanted something from him, he’d send his son with a list of weaknesses to exploit. But the cache and Woodes Rogers seems more like Madi’s doing.

He looks back a the map.

It’s almost nothing. Just a paper lit by the evening sun. Barely more than an outline, although some hills and cliffs are marked. Jim must have carried this with him over several voyages.

Or perhaps he memorized it. Redrew it later.

Jim’s still waiting for an answer to his question, but James doesn’t know exactly what question he was trying to ask, so he counters with one of his own.

“What did your parents say about this place?”

There’s a rustling sound— Jim shuffling his feet. “That it was the last place Captain Flint was seen alive. That it’s where your alliance ended. I was hoping you would tell the rest of the story.”

James looks at Thomas, but Thomas is just sipping his tea, watching James with the same intensity that Jim is.

Maybe he wants to hear the story, too.

Maybe James wants to tell it. It’s been sitting on his chest for years.

He picks up a pen and ink.

“Here’s where our ship was,” he says, making a dot on the coastline. It doesn’t take any effort to remember it— he sees every curve and jut of the coastline in the dirt. In the clouds. This place is never going to leave him, and so he keeps speaking. “Here is where I betrayed your father.”

He doesn’t look up to see how the revelation lands.

If it’s a surprise— if it isn’t. Both would indicate how Silver had chosen to remember him, and James doesn’t realize he’d wanted to know until the moment has already passed.

“Here’s where I killed a man that had been on my crew longer than almost anyone,” he says. “I suppose his bones might still be there, if nobody disturbed them searching for treasure.” Perhaps his katana will be with it, covered in rust. But more likely someone as found Joji and the others by now. Let the bodies give rise to the legend.

Years of planning, months of fighting, and it only took days for it to fall apart.

“Here’s where I saved your father’s life,” he continues, moving his hand closer to the coast. Up a hill, although it’s poorly marked on the map. “My last ally pulled a gun on him, so I shot my ally in the head.”

He looks up in time to see both Jim and Thomas twitch at that. Has he told Thomas about Dooley? Or had he not even registered as one of his sins?

“Here’s where your father and I came to blows.”  _Your father_. Had they continued their war, there’s a chance Jim wouldn’t exist. James tries not to wonder if the boy is worth it.

He moves again. “Here’s where we first saw Rackham’s ship.” Good old Jack Rackham. Months of war, and he’d died on the account for a nearly worthless prize. James turns his eye back to the dot he’d made for the _Walrus_. “Here’s the last place I saw your mother.”

They hadn’t known the significance, at the time. Neither of them had prepared for— had considered— what Silver was willing to do. If James had known, he’d have— what? Said goodbye? He’s turned that question over in his mind over the years. Things he’d wanted to say to her, to ask her. What he would have done in that moment if he’d known what was coming.

But the only person in his life he’d ever had a chance to say goodbye to was Silver, and he’d been too bitter to do it.

“Here’s where your father’s friend Billy Bones started shooting his own men as they tried to escape a burning ship. He’d betrayed Madi first, but we didn’t know that at the time. Here’s where he fell into the sea.” The betrayals and fights are close enough together that they’re merging to form one black spot on the map, and James wants to laugh at that. Billy and his black spots.

And then.

He taps the point of the pen against a spot on the island itself. A wooded place he still sees in his dreams. He thinks he could draw every tree, every branch.

He doesn’t think he could draw Silver’s face.

“Here’s where your father pointed a gun at me,” he says, “and told me Captain Flint had to die.” Here’s where Silver had told him that Thomas was alive. Here’s where he’d realized that it didn’t matter what was true: Silver might be able to kill him, but that would have killed Silver as well, and Flint hadn’t been able to let that happen.

God, he’d loved him so much.

Jim and Thomas are still watching him when he puts the pen down. James turns away from them and walks to the fire, trying not to see the Walrus burning.

“You left out the part where you buried the chest,” Jim says quietly, after a few moments had passed.

“I told you what’s on that island. History and betrayal and death. And your parents want to go back there?”

“Well.” Jim goes quiet, and James closes his eyes.

Thomas snorts. “They don’t know where you are, do they?”

The last thing they need are Silver and Madi, enraged and on their doorstep. Although the thought warms James inside— maybe he wants them to come bursting in here demanding their son, maybe he wants to yell and for them to yell back and after that—

He doesn’t know what he would want after that.

“Ma knew where I was going. Like I said, she’s the one who knew where you were. And my pa certainly knows by _now.”_

“But you didn’t tell him?”

“He’d have wanted to come,” Jim says. “And he wouldn’t want to. He’d have agonized over the decision, just like I know he’s now trying to decide if he’s going to sail with us to get the cache.” There’s something hard in his eyes when he looks at Flint, something that looks a little like Silver near the end. “He hasn’t left the island since I can remember.”

“He never did much like sailing.” It comes out fonder than James had intended it to, and he looks back to the fire. “If Madi gets the cache. Is she going to use it to fight, or to run?”

“She’s going to use it to win.”

He’s a boy. He’s a goddamn child. He’s sailed from the Bahamas and faced untold dangers to stand here and demand this. This last thing James has kept.

And somewhere along the line, James has lost his ability to say no to Silvers.

His hand shakes a little when he picks up the pen, jotting a quick _x_ on a cove.

 

 

 

.

Rogers doesn’t see her when he first enters his room.

The years have not been kind to him: his face is sallow, his scar more pronounced. There’s a curl in his left hand that doesn’t look intentional, and he’s picked up a limp along the way. Max has watched him, has collected reports as he moved around town. She knows who he’s been talking to, and enough of what he’s been saying: he’s barely been here a day, but his agenda is clear.

It’s enough for her to make her play early.

He sighs against the door for a moment, before taking a couple slow steps forward.

She clears her throat, and he freezes, hand going to his side— but there’s no sword there. So Max smiles as she steps forward into the light, raising the item in her hands.

“Once again,” she says, “you’re saved by a book.”

“Max.” He nods, like this is a daytime meeting in his office and not a nighttime meeting in his private chambers. “How did you get in here?”

“There is no part of this island that is closed to me,” she says, putting the book down on one of the small tables. Raps her knuckle on the cover. “It’s an interesting story they’ve printed here.”

She knows Anne met the man writing it: Max had poured over the pages, wondering what parts were Anne’s contributions. But Anne isn’t the only one Johnson found. Max had laughed at its inaccuracies, but noted truths and lies specific enough they could have only come from one man.

It’s a story of Nassau.

But it’s not her story.

She knows that’s her role. To rule from the shadows. To end up in no histories, because she is not the type of person that they write histories about. She is too dark; too female. Only pants-wearing, sword-wielding Anne and the late Mary belong with the men in their pages.

“I thought it was interesting,” she says. “The omission of Captain Flint and Long John Silver.”

Rogers laughs the laugh of a dying thing. “Were they ever real?” he asks. “Or were simply legends the whole time?”

Max remembers, sometimes, the desperate young man who tried to talk her out of a scheme _for her own good._ Maybe Rogers is right. There wasn’t a single thing about Long John Silver that was true, and from what she knows of Savannah, she’d guess the same about Flint.

“It’s hard to know what is real,” she says, “especially in a place like this. Facts become stories. Stories are twisted to fit in a song.” When Rogers doesn’t respond, she hums. _“Says Jolly Ned Teach of Bristol.”_

He does blanch a little at that. Though whether it’s at the reminder of what he’d done, or at his distaste for ditties, it’s hard to say. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here because today you met with Captain Smith, and the young Mr. Underhill: men strongly opposed to the formation of Nassau’s governing council.”

“Ah, I see.” Rogers sits down on the bed and loosens his cravat. It’s either to show his indifference, or a jab at Max’s former position. She grits her teeth. “Is this supposed to be a threat? I dissolve your council, you watch my every move?”

“I am here to tell you a story,” Max says. She folds her hands in front of her. “There are tales of many pirates in this book. But you never heard mine.”

“Didn’t I? A lowly whore becomes the madam, _buys_ her way into power?” He says _buys_ like he means something else.

“I was a slave,” she says. “And then I was a whore. And then I was Eleanor’s whore.” That part takes him aback: for a moment, his hand stops shaking. “I didn’t think of it like that at the time. But that’s what it was. And yet. We cared for each other. I loved her. Part of her loved me. Did she never tell you?”

Of course she hadn’t.

It’s been more than a decade and a half since Eleanor died, and the sting is long gone. Eleanor lives next to Jack in Max's memories, in a place of quiet sadness.

“And then I allied with John Silver, and she took sides against me. Our paths diverged. When Jack and Anne took over the inn, I became the madam. When Eleanor was arrested, I became a business owner. And when John Silver came to me about the Urca gold, I became a pirate. I was the reason Jack was able to recover it at all.”

Sometimes, she plays this game: was it the Spanish or the Urca gold that saw Eleanor killed and Nassau burned?

Sometimes, she plays a different game: had Eleanor lived, would Nassau have ever found peace? Or was her death a necessity for this new world they built?

Both questions end with Woodes Rogers.

“When Jack ran Nassau, it was I who managed it. When you came, I was the one who kept the street on your side. When I saw you were no longer fit to lead, I sailed with Jack and Anne to Philadelphia to meet with the Guthries, and I chose Featherstone as the next governor. When he began ailing, I formed the council. It might not be written in your book, but you and I know the truth. For nearly twenty years, my decisions and support have been vital to the security and stability of this place. It would be unwise to think I can be disregarded.”

He’s aged, and he’s weakened, but that cold look in his eye hasn’t changed. “Jack Rackham said a similar thing to me, once. Told me how far he’d come in life to meet me in this fight. I bet he loved thinking he’d gotten the better of me.” He gestures to the room. “But here I am. Shame he didn’t live to see it.”

Anne would have killed him for saying that. But Anne isn’t here. She’d wanted to come, but that would have made Rogers think Max had something to fear from him, and her plan doesn’t allow that.

“Jack’s flag will fly here long after yours,” Max says quietly. “Of that I am certain.”

“Why?” he asks. “Because you want it to? Because it doesn’t fit your story for him to be long dead, and me returned to my position? No. The pirate story is over. And if you can’t accept that, perhaps your story is over as well.”

She’s stared down many people she hated.

It’s never felt quite like this.

(“Did it work?” Anne asks her later. She’s been waiting up, sword across her lap.

“He will dissolve the council,” Max says. “Within the next few days, probably. Just to prove he can.”

“Hated those smug bastards anyway.”

Max doesn’t disagree.)

 

 

.

She returns to Nassau not to fight a war but to spit on a grave.

Sometime after the Spanish raid, a new church had been built. He’s buried behind it, a couple miles from his late wife. Thousands of miles from his home.

_Woodes Rogers  
1679-1732_

“Illness,” she says aloud. There’s no one around to hear her: it’s the hottest part of the day, and anyone with any sense is inside. “You made it too easy.”

They’d been braced for a fight. For vengeance. He’d dissolved Max’s council, he’d been set on rebuilding the fort: all of that spoke of retaliation.

And then he’d died.

How quickly fate turns.

“Smollett is still running around Skeleton Island,” she tells the stone. “I imagine he’ll be there for a while yet, considering the state of his ship. _Your_ ship. And there’s no one to rescue him, since they were sent in secret. I suppose you wouldn’t have wanted the word getting out that you were chasing children’s stories. Buried pirate treasure on an unplotted island.”

She doesn’t know what Rogers looked like when he died. But she can recall perfectly how he was when she met him— seventeen years younger with blood on his hands. Slave trader, island colonizer, murderer.

“No matter how long he’s stranded there, he won’t find it. Because it’s mine. We were already there when he arrived— me, my son, a few trusted men.”

John hadn’t come, though she won’t say as much to Rogers. He’d been so afraid— afraid of that place, afraid of trusting Flint’s map. Afraid that he and Madi together on that island would remind her to hate him. Afraid he’d lose their son to the fight. So he’d stayed behind, and he’d regretted it. She thinks there might be bruises on her arms from how tightly he’d held her and Jim when they’d returned.

 _(If it’s a boy,_ she’d said to him once, _I’d like to call him James.)_

(He’d looked at her like he wanted to drown and said, _if you like._ )

“We had to sneak around the forest for a few days— they had more men, but we knew where the cache was, and they didn’t. We couldn’t risk leading them right to it. But Julius and Koji lured them off to the northern coast.” Koji is only Jim’s age, but he’s shown a knack for strategy. Not that that had been any consolation to Jimmy, who had been ready to run after them. “They gave us time to find the spot on the map. We did, and we dug— and there it was. Just waiting for us to come back for it, at a time such as this.”

It had been smaller than she remembered it. An old wooden chest, rotting a bit after years underground, hiding an untold fortune. Nassau’s ransom. _Her_ ransom. Her peoples’ freedom.

“Our ship was faster than yours, but we still couldn’t risk your men chasing after us when we realized what happened. Dealing with them was laughably easy— there was only one guard. He wasn’t expecting a woman, and his confusion gave me the seconds I needed to kill him. Then I set the ship on fire. They’ll have to build a new one to leave.”

It had felt like vindication when she’d done it. Every option for vengeance that she’d passed up to protect her people, unleashed in one moment of firey glory. It had burned so bright.

“We found Julius and Koji at the rendezvous. Held off your men while they swam out to meet us.

“And then we left.”

The grave has nothing to say to her. It’s just a stone, with the name of a man who once put her in chains. Who had become a singular figure in her nightmares: a representation of all England had to offer her, just waiting for a chance to return.

And England will return.

But Madi will be ready.

And someday— maybe fifty years from now, maybe a hundred, but someday—

Someday, England will lose.

And this time—

“Flint’s treasure will remain in legend. But it will be dispersed across the Americas. Building ships. Arming camps. Just one gem could help half a dozen men and women escape to freedom. History won’t ever know what we did. But dead men tell no tales, so I can tell you this secret.”

Madi crouches down, leaning so close to the carved name that she could almost be kissing it.

“The secret is,” she whispers, “I win.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

**1880**

“My grandmother, your great grandmother, she knew some pirates personally,” the man says to his nephew. “She used to tell my mother stories about Flint and Long John Silver’s buried treasure, somewhere on Skeleton Island.”

“Where’s that?” the nephew asks.

“No one knows for sure.”

“Is it still there?”

The man shrugs. “Probably not. Mother said Grandmother Hudson’s old employer heard about a man—Smollett, he was called— in a tavern somewhere, claiming Silver and a boy called Jim had gone and dug it up.”

The nephew’s eyes light up. “And what else?”

The man shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says.

“Who was Jim? Did he know Silver was a pirate? Did they sail there just themselves? Did they have to fight anyone for it? What happened to it now—”

The man smiles at the boy's enthusiasm. “I don’t know,” the man says again. “But I bet we could make up a pretty good story.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> (And at some point Madi and Jim put Silver on a ship and he shows up at James and Thomas's door and they all glare at each other for a few minutes before hugs are exchanged, etc.) 
> 
> Title and bit of song from [this poem Ben Franklin wrote about Blackbeard's death](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/travel/1993/11/28/blackbeards-lair/6fcbdb35-c9ad-431b-a7f5-eb6b75d94f0a/?utm_term=.9fa3b6c99cf9). 
> 
> I wrote the Maxanne reunion after Anne's bit, but it didn't really fit here, so I'll probably expand it into its own story at some point. Because they were up to a lot in that ten year gap.
> 
> Alexander Selkirk was actually sailing under another captain who was under Dampier's command, but... who's counting. Rogers has a poor memory.


End file.
